Skepticism

EVENTS

An unsurprising case of plagiarism

I’ve noticed this before, and I’m sure many of you have, too: you can often take creationist comments, especially when they’re lengthy, run them through a google search, and discover that the were lifted wholly from some other source. If you read the creationist literature for any length of time, it really begins to sound all alike, because what they’ll often do is cobble together their treatises by lifting whole paragraphs and pages from previous creationist tracts. It’s the kind of thing where, if they did it as a student in my class, they’d get an automatic fail, especially since they rarely bother to include attributions.

Creationists seem to be the greatest fulfillment of Voltaire’s Prayer that I can even imagine. If someone came up with a fictional group that was just as farcical as creationists are, it would instantly ruin any viewer/reader’s suspension of disbelief. I mean, there is just no way you could get a group of people that misguided, arrogant, thick-headed, incompetent, sleazy, and outright stupid. It’s just unrealistic! And yet here they are: Walking, talking, mouth-breathing real-life human beings, sinking into the depths of human stupidity and finding that there is always a few more miles to go.

It’s always entertaining when creationists copy-paste-bomb discussion boards – my standard response is to reply with a link to where they blatted it from perhaps with a #copypastefail. There’s no point responding to points raised – half the time the creationist content-replicator hasn’t read or understood the content, just saw that it included some magical words they recognised that may be related to the topic or their wish to proselytise.

There’s no point responding to points raised – half the time the creationist content-replicator hasn’t read or understood the content,

Of course not – also, in the case at hand, the creationist defense usually entirely consists of lecturing about WLCs credentials, how many atheists he has crushed in debates with his superior intellect etc.. without touching upon the rather paltry contents like the Kalam fucking argument. I would be surprised if we didn’t find a specimen of that sort in this very thread.

QFT. If creationsist didn’t exist and you wrote a fiction piece featuring creationsist as they are your editor/publisher would say: “your creationists lack verisimilitude, the reader is never going to buy that these people are that crazy en masse“

Don’t badmouth Kalam.
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I once used Kalam as a pseudonym for fun on a board parasited by far right “Messa Real True Christian™” Trolls.
Predictably, the local wankers -who all pretended to have superior knowledge in fucking everything by virtue of being good ol white christian boys & girls- immediately jumped on me: they somehow recognized that Kalam sounded somewhat arabic, therefore I was necessarily some sort of repulsive muslim “baby-fucker” who lusted after their daughters and wanted to turn the Western World into a hellish dictatorship where pure white superior humans would be exterminated and replaced by half-breed slaves.
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Of course, they never heard of the Kalam Argument: anything -even remotely- dialectic would have hurt their poor little brains which were already strained enough by the enormous effort required to find new ways to boast about their self-proclaimed superiority.
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So that makes it one of my words: it’s like a magic revealer of the absolute fatuity of the worst humanity has to offer.

The majority of Sunni Muslim apologetics rarely if ever rise above the level of Ray Comfort and crew. The arguments are banal, laughably false, or are C&P bombs from more impressive sounding apologists like W.L. Craig and what not. The only people impressed with them are the sort who would find charlatan hacks like Zakir Naik remotely convincing.

The only decent philosophy and apologetics that even occurs in Islamic circles anymore is, ironically, among Shia Muslims, who had continued to maintain a relatively strong tradition of philosophical discourse, albeit one based primarily on Hellenic philosophy. Sunni Muslims have by and large dropped philosophy alogether – why is unclear; some point to al-Ghazali’s seminal Tahafut al-Falasifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers), but I am not entirely convinced by this.

Whatever the case, Islamic “apologetics” is by and large banal and laughable. There are some analytic Muslim philosophers here and there in philosophy, but they are few and far between.

Is it too obvious to point out that the plagiarists seem unable to um, create? Ironically, their not having the ability to create for themselves leads them to make slight changes to existing material. To improve it. To bring it forward. To evolve it.
Sweet, sweet Irony.

‘….God loves Heinrich just as much as He loves you and so accords him sufficient grace for salvation and seeks to draw him to Himself. Indeed, God may have known that through the guilt and shame of what Heinrich did under the Third Reich, he would eventually come to repent and find salvation and eternal life.

Paradoxically, being a Nazi may have been the best thing that happened to Heinrich, since it led to his salvation. Of course, one may wonder about those poor people who suffered in the death camps because of Heinrich.

But God has a plan for their lives, too…’

I wonder if any of the people sent to death camps ever thought that God’s plan for their lives sucked….

A. No. It is never OK to break God’s law by lying. In this case it is doubly wrong since God may have a plan to save the person or God’s plan for that person may be that he dies now by murder. It is a serious thing to thwart God’s plans.

Lila Rose???

Anyway it may not be cut and paste that makes all the creationist comment alike – don’t forget their love of rote learning in place of actual thinking and understanding. Seriously, they really do memorise this stuff.

Thanks again for the many, many page views this feature sent my way. Hamza has updated his article to give proper credit to Christian apologists Paul Copan, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Frank J. Tipler, John D. Barrow, Keith Ward and Roy Abraham Varghese as well as atheist philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong as influencing his thinking on the matter. No Muslim authors were cited.